Hello from Spain!

[gettinwiser]

Hi all, been quietly reading this blog for almost a year now. It's been refreshing to see a community of "real" people, narrating their journey through life's ups and downs for years, and encouraging each other on their journey to FI and a simpler life.

Not sure if this will be helpful/interesting to anyone else, but it will probably be helpful for me haha, so my idea is to start posting my own journal here, with a monthly update of my rough financials, and maybe some scattered reflections on my career, hobbies, sports, and other miscellaneous stuff.

Let me quickly introduce myself: Spanish 29 yo guy, working on fintech industry as a remote software developer. Job used to be interesting and challenging but now has become quite boring, looking to switch industry, probably to pharma or consulting, but market is tough and haven't found any good option yet. Just moved to live with my gf, own a car (fully paid) for moving around as we live in a village with very bad public transport options. Gf is buying a small apartment directly to family members without taking any bank loans. I'm paying small rent to help out with her payments, as well as half of water, gas and electricity expenses; she's paying everything else house related, like renovations and fixes.

I am not a big spender (though still spending much more than some of the most frugal people in this forum), and being born a white man in a European country on a mid class family, I know I'm very privileged and in a much better starting position than 90% of the population. That said, inflation and housing prices in Spain have been rising faster and faster for the last decade, and salaries have been pretty much stagnant for many years now, so I'm a bit worried that inflation is going to make saving a high percentage of my salary increasingly difficult. My aim is to keep looking for opportunities to increase my income through improvement on skills that are both mid to high paying and that I enjoy or at least don't hate, and to cut on unnecessary expenses, like eating out or ordering too often, or buying stuff that I trick myself into thinking that I need but don't really need.

I will crunch some numbers and come back to you soon with my first journal post on the ERE Journals section. Thanks for reading me, see you around!

[delay]

Welcome to the forum!

That said, inflation and housing prices in Spain have been rising faster and faster for the last decade, and salaries have been pretty much stagnant for many years now, so I'm a bit worried that inflation is going to make saving a high percentage of my salary increasingly difficult.

Yeah, it's like that in The Netherlands as well. Rents, housing prices, public transport, taxes, and especially food are becoming more expensive.

There used to be a "doomer" side of ERE based on the idea that the world is running out of resources. That could explain why we get less. It might also be that we are members of a group that now gets a smaller share of the world's goods. Like inhabitants of Western Europe, software developers, or educated salaried workers, or something. The people I speak to from China, India or the US are often surprisingly positive about their material progress.

[gettinwiser]

Thank you for your thoughts @delay. Yes, I guess it's all a matter of perspective, in the parts of the world are on the rise economically and demographically people will tend to be more optimistic as they see their purchasing power and quality of life improved over the years. In most western countries the average person is seeing the opposite, specially the ones who work on industries that used to be booming and have been slowing down the last years, or as you said, educated salaried workers with a university degree. A couple decades ago that higher education used to mean having great job security and earning a salary that was high enough to maintain the cost of living of a family, which is not the case anymore.

On the other hand, now we have a vast wealth of information available a few clicks away on our phone or computer, so learning new skills and connecting with people and opportunities globally is easier than ever! This is something that helps me stay positive when I think about how fast the world is changing and how quickly a job can become irrelevant, specially in tech.

[loutfard]

A couple decades ago that higher education used to mean having great job security and earning a salary that was high enough to maintain the cost of living of a family, which is not the case anymore.

Has job security really diminished compared to one or two generations ago? The world has started turning faster, so an employee-employer relationship certainly is less for life than before. That negatively affects job security in the sense of a single job/employer for life. How about job security in the sense of earning money through a job, whatever the employer though? Perhaps that has just improved?

A median salary at least here still is high enough to sustain a family. If using the old spending patterns, that is, and avoiding 2025 style mimetic spending to some extent.

[zbigi]

A couple decades ago that higher education used to mean having great job security and earning a salary that was high enough to maintain the cost of living of a family, which is not the case anymore.

40 years ago, less than 10% of people got a university degree. Getting it meant you belonged to some kind of elite, which naturally translated into a high standard of living. Right now, in the US, 66% of people go to college, 46% graduate with associate degree and 37% with a bachelor degree. So, getting a Bsc is no longer a signal of being a strong job candidate.
It's a bit of scam really, since nowdays young people often need to spend four years getting a mediocre degree only so that they can get a simple office job that 40 years ago only required a high school degree.

The wider problem is that our society is getting more and more complex by the year, and so it requires more and more "knowledge workers" capable of dealing with this complexity. Naive politicians thought that they could create a such workforce if they just send more people to universities. Whereas the bottleneck may not be getting the education, but just the amount of people who have aptitude for doing such complex knowledge work. There are just not nearly enough talented people for our apetites, and this explains why everything is so meh. For example, a hundred years ago, trains were often running on time, whereas now, with all the technological progress than happened in the meantime, it seems impossible, and you even see typos in messages issued by the train companies (because their highly trained and credentialed communication officer has an IQ of 100 and trouble concentrating for longer periods of time, and a 100 years ago he would have been a farm worker).

[gettinwiser]

Thank you for your insights to both @loutfard and @zbigi!

loutfard regarding your thoughts on employee-employer relationship change, I think this change has benefited mostly the employer. With this shift from lifelong relationship to more of a project-based and skill-based recruiting, most of the pressure on re-adapting to market through skill stacking and building a reputation lies on the employee. Sure recruiting and training costs have gone up significantly for the companies (probably the reason why so many freelance and senior job offers out there compared to junior or starting positions, not worth it to train someone who is going to be out in 1-3 years). But this shift has also eroded the concept of loyalty, both from employee to company and from company to employee, and workers unions memberships have plummeted, so protection against layoffs and poor working conditions has taken a hit too. Nowadays the job market seems to be much more about lifelong learning and reputation building than loyalty and sacrifice for a single company. I guess in a sense we have sacrificed simplicity and security for some more freedom and variety but also a much more brutal competition for jobs. Figure we could call it a more purely capitalist job market?
We could also think about how globalization and outsourcing has affected the market in more wealthy countries, or the shift from companies to avoid direct hire and just hiring freelancers or consulting companies. My prediction is that most people are going to be worse off with this change, but that the ones who are able to adapt and keep building a reputation and skillset will be benefited, at least economically speaking.

zbigi I liked your thoughts on the increasing complexity and how we are reaching a point where we need more intelligent knowledge workers than we currently have available just to keep up with this pace of changes and innovation. This complexity increase and need for quick adaptation to changes might partly explain the shift in the job market loutfard and I were discussing about. I do believe that right now we as a society cannot keep up with all the challenges arising in this increasingly complex world, and that people who cannot adapt are going to have a hard time in the upcoming years. Disruptive innovation used to happen much less often in the past, and there was always a long period of adaptation. But I feel like just over the last century so many disruptive technologies have been created that we cannot adapt fast enough to them. Also, mainly thanks to attention-sucking algorithms and instant gratification, we have an unprecedented mental health crisis; society is much less pain-tolerant and less able to focus. So it is increasingly difficult to escape this constant dopamine bombing and actually spend time on things that are healthy for our mind and body and/or productive for society.

Sorry for the rambling at some points of this post haha, my head just kept connecting loosely related things with each other. Of course these are just my thought and opinions, not trying to impose my views on anyone, there's a high change that I'm wrong on some or most of what I just said.

[Stasher]

Welcome to the forums @gettinwiser , I like your user name

[gettinwiser]

Thanks @Stasher! Let's see it I can make honor to it haha

[ForaDesSembrat]

Welcome to the forums @gettinwiser! I think our situations have a lot in common, so I'm really looking forward to following your journal and seeing how your journey develops.

Following the discussion: while I agree that the economic situation hasn’t improved much for the average worker in most southern European countries lately, I still think we’re in a relatively privileged position as software developers. And considering the current housing crisis in Spain (especially in the big cities), having a somewhat stable housing situation already puts you in a much stronger position than many young people in the country. It can definitely be discouraging to read about people in the U.S. earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but we’re still among the lucky ones